fesco questions
- What will you be able to accomplish by being elected, that you would not otherwise be able to do as a contributor?
Sitting on FESCo allows you to contribute not just to the improvement of Fedora as a software platform as we all do, but also attempt to set the pace and tone of development. In the end, FESCo can act as the sober second thought, an arbiter, or provide technical advice to all Fedora contributors, which I think is a fairly important role I can continue to help with.
- What will you do to ensure that Fedora remains at the forefront of innovation in the GNU/Linux space?
Continue to refine the processes that have been enacted by the board and FESCo over the last few releases, continue to help smooth and cheerlead the No Frozen Rawhide process, which some people have pointed out has been bumpy, but I believe to be a massive improvement over the freeze/thaw model with massive change drops we had previously. As we get better at working within our new flow, I think both the branched and rawhide quality will improve.
- What do you view Fedora's purpose and place being in the F/LOSS microcosm.
That's a difficult question to answer, because I believe we're in a bit of a transition from being focused on a single spin (the desktop) from RHL to early Fedora, to now, where Fedora is more of a platform to be built upon. In any case, I believe Fedora must remain at the cutting edge, with close integration of upstreams into the distro.
- What are your top three priorities as a board member?
On FESCo, I believe my three priorities are to: 1) Stay on top of what's going on in the distro. 2) Provide unbiased advice or criticism. 3) Provide high quality technical advice. With these things in mind helping set the technical pace of the Fedora Project.
- What do you think about Fedora's vision and goals?
I think they're both laudible, and attainable. A lot of objection to the new processes and procedures have been from people who do not believe they should be subject to the same rules as others, and while some of the criticism is warranted, for instance, that sometimes updates have taken longer to get out than others, these hiccups can be smoothed with volunteers and effort. It is certainly an improvement on what we had before, though.
- Who do you think Fedora is for today? Who should it be for?
Again, this is a complicated question, I believe Fedora should continue to set a solid pace of integrating cutting edge open source software, and provide consistent releases on a timely schedule. It should be generally stable, predictable (in terms of time frame, not expectation) and as high quality as can be managed with the small (relatively) pool of volunteers we have. In the future, I think we should investigate a more upstream/downstream branching model for spins, as opposed to the current one size fits all tree of packages we have now, but that's a much longer term discussion. From that base though, Fedora could be tailored to anyone, and doesn't need to be pigeonholed.
- If proprietary is black (100% gray) and uncompromising completely free right down to the hardware is white (0% gray), what % of gray are you and why?
I am 0% grey; for reasons which are far too complicated to explain here, I also think re-distributable firmware is fine.
- Where do you see Fedora in five years? How do you think we'll get there?
I'm not very good at looking in a crystal ball. I hope we're continuing to provide the first line of integration for many open source projects, which is a critical service to the ecosystem. In some respects, even if people do not install Fedora, they're still enjoying the fruits of our effort when, for instance, another distro doesn't have to deal with a hundred new build failures when they update to a new GCC, since they've all long since been filed and fixed upstream.
I think the only way we'll get there is through hard work, quality volunteers, and cooperation.